


running like a wildfire

by lethandralis



Series: abandoned works in progress [2]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alcohol, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, NSFW, also it doesnt really come up but mac is trans and so is maya, because I said so, this rating is for later chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-27 01:27:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20037634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lethandralis/pseuds/lethandralis
Summary: the wasteland is a vast, empty, quiet place, full to the brim with danger and strange people.





	1. one

Maya’s got this mercenary she hired a little while back. Five foot six, blue eyes, always getting himself into fights he doesn’t seem like he can handle and then handling them anyway. He’s got a temper and a big ego, sure, but he’s good to have around. She hired him to guard Sanctuary and to help with odd jobs as necessary, and he had seemed strangely eager for the job. He takes well to his guard shifts, cooks for a crowd, and keeps his room tidy enough. An exemplary employee, if a little mouthy.

  
It has been two months since Maya thawed out, and the search for her son keeps hitting wall after wall after wall. The detective she’s hired – a strange but charming synth named Nick – is great at his job, sure, but the wasteland has its own special way of hindering progress. The lack of transportation, for example, or the difficulty acquiring almost anything necessary for decent human living. Before the bombs, she’d grown used to doing everything fast and hard; staying up until midnight gathering information for a case, then waking up at five to make it down to the courthouse and doing it all over again.

  
Now things are different. She is always busy, sure, but the speed at which she can accomplish things is, at times, mind-bogglingly slow. In bad traffic, it had been a forty-five-minute drive into the city from Sanctuary Hills, in her sweet little red Corvega. Now it is a day-long walk, assuming minimal trouble along the way. She itches for a car, a bus, _something_. Everything in her tells her that she’s doing all of this too slowly, that minute-by-minute her son is slipping away from her.

  
But there’s nothing she can do. This is all a fate handed down to her by some fucked-up god, or maybe it’s just happenstance. One bad roll of the dice after another.

  
When it gets bad, and the nights are cold and long, she wonders if it wouldn’t have been better if they’d stayed in their house when the announcement came over the television. She’d known people who planned to do that; they couldn’t get into vaults, or they just weren’t interested in spending their natural lives in a tin can underground. So they just sat there, holding their family members close, and waited for the end. They became nameless skeletons in ruined houses; dead, but at peace.

  
But it wasn’t the life that was meant for her, she thinks. She woke up from that vault. It is time to move on. There are more important things to consider than her own misery.

  
On the way back from building defenses in Graygarden one day in early December, Maya considers the mercenary. She wonders if she couldn’t commandeer his help – he seems capable enough, and if she could go around and get defenses built at all the Minutemen-allied settlements, then maybe she could actually find her fucking son.

  
Or, she thinks, even better: she could trust Minutemen duties to Preston for a week or two, and take MacCready along with her in the search for Shaun. Nick has a lead on the man they think murdered her husband and kidnapped her son, and she has this sneaking suspicion that he won’t give up information easily. MacCready seems like as good a second gun as any; she’d taken to bringing Piper around with her recently, but she needs to take care of her sister, and Maya can’t begrudge her caring for her family.

  
_Yeah_, she thinks, marching up the hill from Concord. _Two hundred more caps and maybe he’ll be in for it._

* * *

  
Maya explains what’s happened with her son and her husband and MacCready agrees to do the job for free. She doesn’t ask him to do it for free, he just insists upon doing so; she tries to push a neat little cloth bag of caps across the table to him and he pushes it right back.

  
“_No_. Not for something like this. Besides, you already paid me, remember?” She studies his face; he looks deadly serious, not like he’s just fucking around to try to get something more expensive or more fun.

  
Maya frowns. “What, there’s nothing I can do to repay you?” The idea of dragging him along without payment makes her uneasy. No good in having unpaid debts. Even worse to die with them.

  
He considers a moment. “Tell you what. You know that night-vision scope you put on your gun?” She nods. It had been a bitch to make. “I want one.”

“That it? Really? I can do that in a day.”

  
“Uh, you’re offering more?”

  
“I’m asking you to come clear out an abandoned military base that might be full of deadly robots, MacCready. I think you have the right to ask for more.” The idiocy of this entire mission hits her in a wave, but she shoves it aside. If she dies in Fort Hagen, she dies trying, which is a hell of a lot better than dying holed up in her ruined shell of a house.

  
MacCready considers her offer a moment. “I’ll think on that one.”

* * *

  
MacCready’s sniper rifle is so old and scratched that Maya wonders how it still fires. She tests it, way out behind Sanctuary where none of the guards are likely to get spooked, and sure enough it does, straight and true. Still, as she’s attaching the scope she makes a point to polish it up and generally make it look less awful.

  
It’s odd, really, to be handling a rifle that belongs to a man she barely knows. He’s her employee, sure, in a sense, but they’re not friends. Hell, they’re scarcely _acquaintances_ at this point. But she’s never seen him without his rifle – when he’d handed it off to her, she’d had the queasy feeling she was robbing him somehow. It seems like it ought to be a part of him. She’d given him a spare rifle she’d found on some raider a few weeks back, and as he’d inspected it he’d looked displeased with it, somehow, but not for any reason she could pin down. Maya had wondered how long he’d been handling firearms, to have such a discerning taste.

  
It’s none of her business, she thinks, carefully adjusting the length of the scope. MacCready seems reluctant to give up information about himself, which she figures is reasonable. There is no telling what people might do with sensitive information here. Being closed-off seems less like a bad habit and more like a survival mechanism when everyone is armed and everyone must be assumed to be dangerous.

  
It’s late when she finishes the scope. After having tested it, she props it against MacCready’s doorframe and goes to sleep. Tomorrow, she thinks, will be a long day.


	2. two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they go to fort hagen. there is nothing good in fort hagen.

His boss is an interesting woman, sure, but this job beats the hell out of the Gunners.

Maya is perhaps the tallest woman he has ever met, with the bearing of someone who is, at least most of the time, over-projecting confidence and charisma. She’d mozied into his VIP lounge at the Third Rail uninvited, told his former bosses to piss off, and hired him for 200 caps. MacCready had been too dazed on alcohol and adrenaline and fear to really understand what was happening until she’d led him off to Sanctuary the next day.

His assignment is simple; keep an eye on the perimeter of the settlement, shoot anyone hostile before they start shooting innocent people. She’s brought up other jobs that might need doing in the future, but they’re all simple supply runs and the like. She pays him with a clean, dry room with a door that locks and all the food he can eat.

It’s about two weeks in to his new job when Maya brings up Fort Hagen. She looks exhausted as she explains the vault, her husband, her son. There is no overdone lawyer explaining in her tone, just a dry, desperate pleading.

And then she tries to pay him. Which is nice and all, and if this had been any other sort of situation he might have negotiated a raise. But this… this is different. She has a son. He needs to be found. That’s a matter beyond money.

He feels guilty even negotiating for the scope, but he does it mostly so that Maya will get off his back about it. This is the rare sort of job that he’d rather do for free.

* * *

Two days later and he’s got his old, tattered pack on his shoulder, hiking with a repaired rifle through the middle of nowhere with the only lawyer in the wasteland and a dog. Maya is not talkative, at least at first; he’s not sure if that’s just how she tends to travel or if it’s due to the nature of the mission.

It takes about three hours of walking for MacCready to get antsy about the silence.

“Maya, question?” he asks.

“Shoot.” She is comparing the map on her Pip-Boy with the ruined road in front of them.

“If you had to bang a deathclaw or an assaultron, assuming you wouldn’t die, which would it be?”

Maya pauses, cocking her head at him. “Assaultron.”

“_Really_?”

“I don’t know where a deathclaw’s been! I can at least disinfect an assaultron.” She keeps down the path in front of them, carefully avoiding the ruined remains of a car with a smoking engine block.

“You’re assuming an assualtron would _let you_ disinfect it.”

“And what would a deathclaw do? Roll over and be seduced?”

“No, but a deathclaw doesn’t have a face laser.”

“Fair point.”

MacCready considers for a minute. “Do assaultrons have junk?”

“The next time I find one I’ll let you know.”

“Thank you.”

They spend the next hour discussing the possible tactical advantages of giving horrifying death robots genitalia, which meanders into stories of modified robots, which meanders into Maya telling the story of the time she accidentally re-programmed Codsworth to call her husband “asshole” when she’d been mad at him.

“It, uh, it took me about a week to figure out how to fix Codsworth’s programming. Nate was mad at me pretty much that entire week.”

“But you made up, right?”

“Yeah.” Maya’s smile is watery, and there is silence for a while because MacCready isn’t sure how to continue without making his boss cry.

The rest of the journey is as lighthearted as one might expect a fateful hike to find a kidnapper and murderer to be. The hostiles they encounter along the way are relatively tame, and with three of them there it goes rather quickly.

* * *

Their confrontation with Kellogg is over before it starts. Maya, always the type to talk first and shoot later, steps forward to speak to him while MacCready guards the door, aiming through his scope at a spot directly between Kellogg’s eyes.

When Maya gets the information she needs out of him, she fires one shot. Point-blank range. Kellogg crumples like an imploding house, having lost most of his face. MacCready wonders how he hadn’t seen it coming.

The rest of the synths that Kellogg brought with him go down easily enough. MacCready climbs onto a computer console and starts picking them off. Maya, he can see through his scope, is shaking too badly to be an accurate shot. She’s trying, though.

The silence after he fires his last round is deafening. Maya is staring wide-eyed at nothing. He jumps down from the console and walks over to her, mindful to be loud enough that she can hear through whatever brain-haze she’s in.

“Hey,” he says, weakly. “We did it.”

She shakes her head. “Not really. He doesn’t have my son. You heard him. He’s in the Institute.”

“Okay. So we go get him.”

Maya looks at MacCready as though he’s sprouted a second head. “You _can’t_ be serious.”

“I am. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna strip this place bare, gather up any information about Kellogg we can get. We’re gonna take it to Nick. This is what he _does_. He’ll know something. Heck, he’s a synth. He might be able to help us get in.”

Shell-shocked, Maya goes back to staring staring. “Okay. Can we sit down first?”

“Yeah.”

Maya sits unceremoniously on the cold floor next to Kellogg’s still-bleeding corpse. MacCready joins her and begins rubbing small circles in the center of her back. He figures touch might be able to pull her out of her own head a little, make it safe for her to get moving again. Her whole body is trembling. There is blood on her face and he doesn’t think it’s hers.

It takes probably twenty, maybe thirty minutes before Maya moves again. MacCready keeps her close, moving his hand from her back to her knee when his arm gets sore. The intervening minutes give him plenty of time to consider how crazy this is – sitting on the floor of a ruined military base, comforting a woman born over two hundred years ago who hired him to guard her settlements and help her with supply runs, encouraging her that he would help her find her son. He considers, for a moment, requiring all his new employers to sign a “no crazy jobs” contract upon hiring, but that seems cruel. Maya isn’t some power-hungry Gunner whackjob. She’s a lost, lonesome woman looking to put her family back together. He doesn’t say anything – can’t say anything. There’s nothing to say.

He learns as he sits there on the floor of Fort Hagen that there is something very uniquely disheartening about watching the person that you trust to lead you into a firefight blind have a breakdown on the floor next to a still-warm corpse. He had thought, as they had come down through Fort Hagen, that they might leave this building with Shaun, in whatever state he was in, and Maya would be satisfied. Maybe he would be out of a job, but a woman would have her child back and that would be fine.

But clearly, nothing is so simple.

MacCready wonders if, in another life, this couldn’t have been him; heartsick and mourning, out searching for revenge for a lost love and a lifetime of lost opportunities. He wonders if this isn’t him now, just different.

“Hey, RJ,” she says to him after a while, voice rough, and he startles because that name sounds foreign coming from her mouth.

“I’m here.”

“Can you help me clean this up?”

“Yeah.”

Kellogg’s corpse has stopped bleeding. From the remnants of his brain that blasted out of the back of his skull they find several bits of metal and circuitry. Maya puzzles at them a minute before carefully wrapping them and the attached chunk of brain in a rag and stuffing them in their pack. MacCready has to turn away to force himself not to retch at it, but he doesn’t ask. She has her own reasons to be doing what she’s doing, and they’re none of his goddamned business.

They loot the place for everything it’s worth and gather information from Kellogg’s terminals. When they step out of Fort Hagen, it is dark, but Maya has no interest in sleeping there. They pick a house on the outskirts of the development and hunker down for the night. Maya falls asleep after supper without a word. MacCready stays up most of the night, watching.

* * *

They send Dogmeat home to Sanctuary and make for Diamond City. After the first silent night, Maya starts talking.

“Shaun was the fussiest baby, I’ll tell you. Couldn’t get him to go to sleep for anything.”

“Really now?”

“God, yeah. Sometimes I’d have to drive him around the block for half an hour just to get him to sleep at night. He got it from me, I think.”

“What, do you need warm milk to go to sleep at night, too?”

Maya laughs, genuinely, for the first time since they left Sanctuary. “No, no, but I usually can’t sleep for shit. You ever see me wandering around Sanctuary in the middle of the night, just know I haven’t lost my mind.”

“Alright, boss.”

There are more stories; about her husband, Nate, who was outgoing and kind and fell asleep in his armchair at least three nights a week, about Sanctuary Hills before the bombs dropped, about life before the world went to shit. MacCready listens but doesn’t share; he has stories, sure. Has plenty of them. But they will be there later.

* * *

Halfway back to Diamond City, they find a wide-open field free of structures and hostiles. Maya burns Kellogg’s clothes and buries his pistol with the ashes. They toast with purified water, afterwards, but there is no joy in it.

**Author's Note:**

> **{** i'm going spelunking in my fics folder and posting some stuff that, while i like it, and i will fuss with it, i probably won't end up finishing. i'm sorry! **}**  
this is actually two WIPs smooshed together because, uh, i wrote 10,770 words of this story, decided i didn't like it, started over, and disliked some of how i did the second time. so now i have 20-thousand-some-odd words of work in progress, ha ha ha. (_writing is a fun hobby that you should take up_, they said, in a self-loathing way)  
anyway, this is maya! she's my first sole survivor. she's a conniving trans lady lawyer who maybe sort of has your best interests at heart.  
title is from "wildfires" by the limousines, a song that still goes _so hard_  
i'm on [twitter](http://twitter.com/ceruleanspruce)! come say hi! i love you!


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